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21
July 2010 |
Google has signed a 20-year agreement to buy energy from a wind farm in Iowa, giving it access to enough renewable energy to supply several of its data centres, the company said on Tuesday. The deal provides Google with access to 114 megawatts of wind power at a fixed price over the 20-year period, said Urs Hoelzle, Google senior vice president for operations, in a company blog post.
The predetermined rate will help shield Google from fluctuations in energy prices, while the long term agreement should en... |
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20
July 2010 |
Sweden's Pirate Party wants to continue defending people's "right to act politically," and now some of its members have decided take its ideals a step further than just hosting The Pirate Bay on its own servers. Two members of the political Piratpartiet have big plans to launch its own ISP that delivers service in line with the party's ideals. It won't be like your standard ISP, though: the Pirate ISP founders say that users will be responsible for fixing and maintaining their service, and that privacy will... |
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19
July 2010 |
In an attempt to ensure that Dutch citizens cant access The Pirate Bay, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN took three of the trackerҒs founders to court last summer.
The anti-piracy group won the case and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde were ordered to block Dutch users, a decision they decided to appeal.
In the verdict of the initial appeal, the Court ruled that The Pirate Bay had to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works and make their website inaccessible to Dutch... |
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12
July 2010 |
Facebook has announced it is to launch a "panic button" application on its social networking site.
The button, aimed at children and teenagers, will report abuse to the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) and Facebook.
One installed, the application appears on their homepage to say that "they are in control online".
The launch follows months of negotiation between Ceop and Facebook, which initially resisted the idea.
Ceop, the government law enforcement agency tasked with ... |
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9
July 2010 |
Google boss Eric Schmidt has said he expects the internet giant to be granted a new licence to operate in China.
There had been speculation China would revoke the licence after Google began redirecting Chinese users to its unfiltered search site in Hong Kong.
This was in protest at China's stringent censorship laws.
But last month, Google said it would no longer automatically redirect users in a conciliatory move towards Beijing.
Instead, Chinese users would be sent to a "landing page", which wo... |
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3
July 2010 |
Apple says a fault on its new iPhone 4 is causing it to incorrectly display the phone's signal.
Users who gripped the phone - which went on sale on 24 June - on the lower left-hand side noticed the signal strength and reception fell away.
Apple says the problem relates to an error on how the signal bars are displayed, rather than the signal.
However, some industry experts say that there may be a deeper signal problem than a cosmetic design flaw.
Apple is promising a patch fix "within a few weeks... |
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23
June 2010 |
Google plans to lift the invitation-only policy for Google Voice as of 10 a.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday, said Craig Walker, product manager for Google Voice, in an interview prior to the launch. Over 1 million people are actively using Google Voice at the moment, but Google hadn't wanted to launch the service more widely until it was sure it had enough infrastructure in place to support a larger user base, he said.
Google Voice lets users give out one phone number that will ring their desk phones, home ph... |
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23
June 2010 |
The Symbian Foundation has said version 3 of the Symbian open source mobile phone operating system is finished and ready for use by device makers and developers.
The new version will run on the Nokia N8 phone due to appear shortly, and improves the Symbian operating system - the most widespread smartphone OS in the world - in various ways. Symbian 3 (also called Symbian^3 or S^3) was demonstrated at Mobile World Congress in February, when the second version of Symbian was released as open source.
"Thi... |
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22
June 2010 |
Just 80 days after it was launched in the US, Apple has revealed it has now sold three million iPads as of 21 June.
"People are loving iPad as it becomes a part of their daily lives," Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote in a 22 June statement. "We're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the world, including those in nine more countries next month."
The word "magical" seems to be Apple's fallback adjective in describing the iPad, which was first unveiled in late Jan... |
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8
June 2010 |
Every Google web search could be stored for up to two years under a controversial new EU plan that has the backing of more than 300 Euro-MEPs.
'Written Declaration 29' is intended to be used as an early warning system to stop paedophiles by logging what they look for using search engines.
But civil liberty groups have hit out at the proposal which they say is a 'completely unjustifiable' intrusion into citizens' privacy.
And they claim that there is no evidence that it would even be effective in tr... |
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7
June 2010 |
Facebook has launched a new page designed to help users stay on top of their privacy controls as the firm continues to face complaints from users and privacy watchdogs.
Simon Axten, a manager on Facebook's public policy team, said in a blog post that the new page is a "living resource and a venue to facilitate an interactive discussion about privacy with all of you".
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed yesterday at the All Things Digital conference, and seemed unwilling to have an... |
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2
June 2010 |
Mobile phone companies are about to barrage consumers with advertising for the next advance in wireless network technology: "4G" access. The companies are promising faster speeds and the thrill of being the first on the block to use a new acronym.
But there's less to 4G than meets the eye, and there's little reason for people to scramble for it, at least for the next few years.
Sprint Nextel Corp is the first carrier to beat the drum for fourth-generation wireless technology. It's releasing its first ... |
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2
June 2010 |
The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has started an investigation into Google's collection of data from unsecured wireless networks, the office said in a statement on Tuesday.
Data protection authorities in France, Italy and Germany are already investigating Google's Street View service, after the company said last month that its camera cars mistakenly collected data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks while compiling images of city streets for its Google Maps site.
The company had said in April that it had... |
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2
June 2010 |
Voltage Pictures, the company behind Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker, has filed lawsuits against illegal file-sharers of the movie in the US.
Internet Service Providers have identified 5000 computers which have been involved in sharing the film via peer-to-peer networks.
Voltage Pictures will now seek the names of the PC owners from the ISPs.
The company said that piracy is "directly contributing" to a decline in the film industry.
"With new technology making it easier to commit piracy, we be... |
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2
June 2010 |
A problem with the 8-GB MicroSD card that ships with the HTC Evo has left some early users frustrated. Some people who tried to take photos using the phone's camera got error messages saying the device cannot save files to the SD card "due to insufficient file permissions." Others found that the gadget could not access the SD card at all. Gadget Lab experienced it when testing the phone's otherwise impressive camera.
The Android-based HTC Evo is the first 4G smartphone to hit the market. Google gave abou... |
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